IT expert who threw £153m of Bitcoin away barred from searching Welsh landfill despite £10m dig fund

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For a man whose wealth has, at times, out­stripped that of the Queen, James How­ells lives a remark­ably mod­est life, shar­ing a ter­race house on a busy main road in New­port, South Wales, with his labrador Ruby.

Dec­o­rat­ed in clas­sic bach­e­lor-pad style — all blacks, whites and greys — the front room is dom­i­nat­ed by a large com­put­er mon­i­tor and its screen-saver gives a clue as to why James is not enjoy­ing quite the cham­pagne lifestyle you might expect.

It fea­tures the logo for Bit­coin, the vir­tu­al cur­ren­cy in which James has hold­ings of 8,000 coins. At their peak in Novem­ber last year, they were worth £55,000 each, mak­ing his hoard worth £440 million.

Bit­coin has since slumped but even at today’s low­er prices, it’s worth almost £153 million.

But there is just one prob­lem: nine years ago he acci­den­tal­ly threw away the 51-dig­it pass­code and with­out it he will nev­er be able to access any of them.

For a man whose wealth has, at times, outstripped that of the Queen, James Howells lives a remarkably modest life, sharing a terrace house on a busy main road in Newport, South Wales, with his labrador Ruby

For a man whose wealth has, at times, out­stripped that of the Queen, James How­ells lives a remark­ably mod­est life, shar­ing a ter­race house on a busy main road in New­port, South Wales, with his labrador Ruby

Somewhere on this vast site lies a computer hard drive belonging to IT expert James that carries the key code to a staggering Bitcoin fortune. Just one problem: it’s buried with 110,000 tons of stinking rubbish and the council won’t let him look for it!

Some­where on this vast site lies a com­put­er hard dri­ve belong­ing to IT expert James that car­ries the key code to a stag­ger­ing Bit­coin for­tune. Just one prob­lem: it’s buried with 110,000 tons of stink­ing rub­bish and the coun­cil won’t let him look for it!

That dig­i­tal key is on a lap­top hard dri­ve he believes is cur­rent­ly buried some­where in 110,000 tons of rub­bish in a near­by land­fill, now grassed over.

Bor­dered by an ugly indus­tri­al estate and an unpre­pos­sess­ing retail park, it is only a five-minute dri­ve away.

But it might as well be on the moon for all the suc­cess he’s had in per­suad­ing New­port City Coun­cil to let him exca­vate the huge mounds beneath to try to retrieve his buried treasure.

‘Four times I’ve been to them and four times I’ve been ignored,’ he says. ‘They have not been co-oper­a­tive at all.’

Now, how­ev­er, he’s launch­ing a new effort to get his hands on that dig­i­tal key and this time he’s backed by £10 mil­lion in fund­ing from ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists Hanspeter Jaberg and Karl Wen­de­born, based in Switzer­land and Ger­many, who have been offered a cut of the pro­ceeds if the dig is successful.

It has been two years in the plan­ning and Nasa sci­en­tists have been among his advis­ers. James will also make use of cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy includ­ing ‘robot dogs’.

And all to find some­thing not much big­ger than a cred­it card.

‘Many peo­ple have acci­den­tal­ly thrown away some­thing they did­n’t mean to,’ James, 37, tells me. ‘The dif­fer­ence is that I’m the only one where it turned out to be a £400 mil­lion mistake.’

That mis­take has made him some­thing of a local celebri­ty but the atten­tion is not always wel­come. As the Mail’s pho­tog­ra­ph­er takes pic­tures of James out­side his house, a speed­ing passer­by shouts: ‘You’ll nev­er find it!’

But oth­ers yell encour­age­ment for the local lad whose fas­ci­na­tion with com­put­ers began young. James, who has spent all his life in New­port where his dad is a car­pen­ter and his mum worked in a fac­to­ry mak­ing sil­i­con chips, was only ten when he became his pri­ma­ry school’s unof­fi­cial IT trou­bleshoot­er, help­ing teach­ers oper­ate lap­top com­put­ers in class.

Lat­er, work­ing as a sys­tems engi­neer for organ­i­sa­tions includ­ing the Welsh Ambu­lance Ser­vice, he spent many nights chat­ting in ear­ly inter­net forums for gamers and that was where, in 2009, he began to hear talk of Bit­coin, a form of dig­i­tal mon­ey invent­ed by an indi­vid­ual who used the name Satoshi Nakamo­to (and whose iden­ti­ty remains a mystery).

James was intrigued by the idea of a cur­ren­cy oper­at­ing inde­pen­dent­ly of gov­ern­ments and cen­tral banks.

Every night, he left his lap­top run­ning the soft­ware to ‘mine’ new Bit­coin. (‘Min­ing’ is the process of cre­at­ing new Bit­coins by solv­ing com­pli­cat­ed math­e­mat­i­cal prob­lems that ver­i­fy trans­ac­tions in the cur­ren­cy. When a Bit­coin is suc­cess­ful­ly mined, the min­er receives a pre­de­ter­mined amount of Bitcoin.)

James claims he was one of the first five peo­ple in the world to do so.

‘There was only one web page devot­ed to Bit­coin and there were no instruc­tions about how to down­load the soft­ware. You had to work it out by your­self,’ he says.

After ten weeks, he had acquired 8,000 coins — which were then vir­tu­al­ly val­ue­less — in his dig­i­tal wal­let and could have had thou­sands more but had to stop min­ing after com­plaints from his then part­ner, Hafi­na. He kept his lap­top in their bed­room and, when it was run­ning, the noise of its fan stopped her sleeping.

‘I know I could have just moved it to anoth­er room but Bit­coin was only an exper­i­ment at the time,’ he says. ‘The coins were worth noth­ing so I just stopped.’

Soon after­wards James knocked a glass of lemon­ade over his lap­top and despite efforts to clean it, it nev­er worked prop­er­ly again.

He sold the com­po­nents for parts, keep­ing the hard dri­ve and trans­fer­ring all the pho­tos and music on it to an Apple com­put­er. The only thing he could­n’t copy across was the tiny file con­tain­ing the pass­code to his Bit­coins because it was­n’t com­pat­i­ble with Apple’s oper­at­ing system.

He threw the hard dri­ve into the kind of junk draw­er most of us have at home and for­got about it for the next three years, con­cen­trat­ing on work and fam­i­ly life — by then he and Hafi­na had two young sons.

Then, in the sum­mer of 2013, he had a clear-out.

‘There were two hard dri­ves in the draw­er,’ he explains. ‘One was emp­ty, the oth­er had the [Bit­coin] file on it and I threw the wrong one away. It’s as sim­ple as that.’

In bed that night he had a nag­ging feel­ing that he should dou­ble-check which dri­ve he’d dis­card­ed. But he woke in the morn­ing to find Hafi­na had tak­en the bin-bag to the tip.

Again, it did­n’t seem impor­tant but that Octo­ber James saw a TV news report about a Nor­we­gian man who had for­got­ten about £20 worth of Bit­coins he’d acquired in 2009, the same year as James mined his. Now they were worth around £700,000.

‘The minute I saw it, I thought, ‘Oh s**t.’ I went straight to the draw­er to check, think­ing, ‘Please say I’ve got the dri­ve with the Bit­coin file on.’ And I did­n’t. I had the blank one. I was in shock. I got that phys­i­cal feel­ing you get when you’ve been giv­en real­ly bad news and I’ve had it every day since.’

At the time, his coins were worth around £750,000 but Bit­coin start­ed appre­ci­at­ing rapid­ly and his stress lev­els soared with every rise.

‘I’d come home from work one day and my coins would be worth £2.2 mil­lion, the next it would be £2.8 mil­lion,’ he recalls.

Final­ly they reached £8 mil­lion and, no longer able to han­dle the pres­sure of deal­ing with it alone, he told Hafi­na what she’d thrown away.

‘At first she told me to stop mess­ing about but then I showed her what I was talk­ing about on the com­put­er and she said, ‘Well you’d bet­ter get down to the land­fill and have a word with them.’ I’d been con­tem­plat­ing that, but I thought they’d look at me like I was stupid.’

When he did vis­it the tip, he was greet­ed by much sym­pa­thet­ic head-shak­ing from coun­cil offi­cials as they con­tem­plat­ed a sprawl cov­er­ing some 15 foot­ball pitch­es of trash — but he was offered a sliv­er of hope.

Man­ag­er, Gwyn Jones, told him that there were excep­tion­al cir­cum­stances where land­fills had been exca­vat­ed — for exam­ple, where the police were look­ing for a body or mur­der weapon.

To get per­mis­sion he would have to approach New­port City Coun­cil. James did so but said they nev­er respond­ed to his calls or emails.

The fol­low­ing year came a down­turn in the val­ue of Bit­coin and his hold­ing fell to around £1.3 mil­lion. With the risk that the costs of try­ing to recov­er the hard dri­ve would out­strip what his coins were worth, James put his exca­va­tion project on hold.

He believes the stress was part­ly respon­si­ble for his break-up with Hafi­na (who lives near­by with their sons).

‘There was no point blam­ing her because it was me who put the hard dri­ve in the bin bag,’ he says. ‘She thought she was doing me a favour by tak­ing it to the land­fill. But the whole ten­sion of some­thing like that caus­es things that would nor­mal­ly be just a lit­tle tiff to be amplified.’

'Many people have accidentally thrown away something they didn't mean to,' James said. 'The difference is that I'm the only one where it turned out to be a £400 million mistake'

‘Many peo­ple have acci­den­tal­ly thrown away some­thing they did­n’t mean to,’ James said. ‘The dif­fer­ence is that I’m the only one where it turned out to be a £400 mil­lion mistake’

That digital key is on a laptop hard drive he believes is currently buried somewhere in 110,000 tons of rubbish in a nearby landfill, now grassed over

That dig­i­tal key is on a lap­top hard dri­ve he believes is cur­rent­ly buried some­where in 110,000 tons of rub­bish in a near­by land­fill, now grassed over

James began invest­ing in oth­er cryp­to-cur­ren­cies and made what he calls ‘a com­fort­able liv­ing’. But as the Bit­coin-themed clock above his desk sug­gests, he did­n’t ever stop think­ing about how he might recov­er the lost hard drive.

He admits that this has put him off pur­su­ing new rela­tion­ships which might dis­tract him from the task.

And he has grown even more deter­mined to search for it, hence the ambi­tious new proposals.

He says that once exca­vat­ed, rub­bish from the tip would pass along a con­vey­or belt under a scan­ner pro­grammed by Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence to pick out any­thing resem­bling a hard dri­ve. Fur­ther along would be a team of sorters to spot any­thing the AI machine missed. As a final check the trash would pass through a mechan­i­cal sort­ing machine to sift out any­thing ‘hard dri­ve-sized’ before the waste returned to the landfill.

To deter thieves who might want to try their luck at find­ing the hard dri­ve, there would be exten­sive CCTV sur­veil­lance of the site plus two ‘robot dogs’.

These remote-con­trolled canines which can run around like their ani­mal coun­ter­parts will beam any­thing they ‘see’ to a cen­tral con­trol room.

Each robot costs around £70,000 but James believes they’re the most cost-effec­tive deter­rent. ‘It’s going to be like dig­ging for a very expen­sive dia­mond and peo­ple will be over the fence try­ing their luck,’ he says.

He esti­mates that, in a worst-case sce­nario, the dig could take up to three years but says it will be of great long-term ben­e­fit to the envi­ron­ment. Recy­clable prod­ucts will be removed from the waste and there are plans to build a solar or wind farm on the site once it has been re-land­scaped. This would hap­pen regard­less of whether the dri­ve is found.

If it is, then not only James and his back­ers will ben­e­fit but the com­mu­ni­ty, too. He will keep 30 per cent of the Bit­coins, anoth­er 30 per cent each would go to his investors and the dig team, and the remain­ing 10 per cent to New­port City Council.

He sug­gests they could invest in a ‘cryp­to econ­o­my’ in the area.

Thanks to the finan­cial back­ing he raised, he says the dig would­n’t cost the coun­cil a pen­ny but they don’t want to engage with him.

‘The only meet­ing I’ve ever had with them was a 20-minute Zoom call in May and that was with a low-lev­el man­ag­er who I believe was giv­en the job of appeas­ing me.

‘At the end she said she would pass the points I made up the chain and get back to me but that was more than two months ago and I’m still waiting.’

In a state­ment to the Mail, the coun­cil’s press office cit­ed var­i­ous rea­sons for its refusal to enter­tain the scheme, includ­ing the ‘huge neg­a­tive envi­ron­men­tal impact on the sur­round­ing area’.

‘There is also no guar­an­tee that the hard dri­ve is even at the land­fill site, and even if it was, the chances of it being… in a recov­er­able con­di­tion… are extreme­ly slim,’ it added.

The coun­cil declined to put any­one up for inter­view or pro­vide any evi­dence for these asser­tions which are rebutted by James and his advis­ers, includ­ing Gwyn Jones who is now retired but is help­ing James with his search.

He insists every­thing put in red skips for gen­er­al waste — as the bag con­tain­ing the hard dri­ve would have been — went into land­fill so the coun­cil’s claim that it might not be at the site is baffling.

So too is their state­ment about the hard dri­ve being unus­able, even if it is found. Anoth­er of James’s advis­ers worked for the com­pa­ny that retrieved the black box fol­low­ing the Space Shut­tle Colum­bia dis­as­ter in 2003.

He main­tains that as long as the data stor­age disc in the dri­ve has­n’t been cracked, there is an 80 to 90 per cent chance they will be able to recov­er the file.

With­out fur­ther expla­na­tion from the coun­cil, it’s hard to avoid the impres­sion they have dis­missed James’s pro­pos­als — regard­ing him as a cryp­to crackpot.

If they con­tin­ue to deny him per­mis­sion to dig, he’s con­tem­plat­ing legal action — sug­gest­ing that to deny him access to his prop­er­ty in this way is tan­ta­mount to theft.

‘Why should I give up on what’s mine?’ he asks.

‘Even if I want­ed to for­get about it, it’s nev­er going to go away.

‘Most peo­ple won­der why I haven’t gone crazy and that’s because I’m focus­ing on the task in hand.

‘For the moment, all I can think about is recov­er­ing the device.’

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